ANATOMY OF TORTURE — Historian Christopher Dietrich on the 100-year-long history of American torture; Jeffrey St. Clair on the implications of giving impunity to the CIA’s torturers; Chris Floyd on how the US has exported torture to its client states around the world. David Macaray on the Paradoxes of Police Unions; Louis Proyect on Slave Rebellions in the Open Seas; Paul Krassner on the Perils of Political Cartooning; Martha Rosenberg on the dangers of Livestock Shot-up with Antibiotics; and Lee Ballinger on Elvis, Race and the Poor South. Plus: Mike Whitney on Greece and the Eurozone and JoAnn Wypijewski on Media Lies that Killed.

The Socially Conservative Male

by BEN TRIPP

Joke:

Q: What’s the hardest part of being a child molester?

A: Getting the blood out of your clown suit.

Mr. St. Clair of this paper recently supplied me with a list of sex crimes committed by prominent conservative Republicans. The list originated on Wikipedia, and he found it here, probably while surfing the Internet for Lolita pictures.

It is replete with cross-references and is genuine. Mr. St. Clair, being high on dope, thought I would find the list interesting. He probably did not think I would read the entire thing aloud to my co-workers at the Philistine Worker’s Daily, to heartbreaking cries of horror and implorations that I stop before their minds were so tainted they were rendered unfit for wedlock. I now bring you a mere sample of the list of crimes, all of them heinous, so that you might begin to see a pattern among them. I know I did. (A similar and more comprehensive list, including crimes can be found at the web address It will make your hair curl, uncurl, crawl under the sofa, and die.) You can’t make this shit up.

My subject is the so-called conservative male, by which I mean the social conservative, not the fiscal conservative; fiscal conservatives are mean-spirited sons of bitches, but are not necessarily psychotic. Both groups should stop breathing, but while one of them would be performing a courtesy in so doing, the other would be securing the future of the species. The depravity of the conservative male is in exact counter-proportion to the degree of righteousness towards which that conservative pretends. Or to put it another way, show me a pillar and I will show you a pervert. These are not healthy people. They repress the thoughts and feelings that the rest of us let drift unheeded into the ether, raising little more reaction from the well mind than ‘where the hell did that come from?’ I spent years driving my kid to school on a route (the shortest route, you swine) that took us past a Catholic high school. Every morning, swarms of teen girls in plaid kilties, knee socks, and white oxford shirts –a costume second only to the French Maid in terms of prurient association– could be seen on the school lawn, methodically rolling up the waistbands of their skirts to reveal as much thigh as possible before Morning Mass.

Did I harbor unclean thoughts as I drove past? Hell yes. Did I suppress these thoughts, ashamed lest God or offspring should glimpse them like a subscription-only cable channel through the slightly protuberant windows of my eyes? No, I did not. Why? Because they were just thoughts. I knew I would never dally with these young plaid-girt she-scholars, having no real desire to do so, nor access to a supply of GHB. The same cannot be said for conservative males. They are ravening sex fiends on a hair-trigger, doomed to act out their polluted fantasies because thought and deed are the same to them. (There’s something else wrong with conservative females, a subject I will not treat here. Mainly because they don’t seem to get caught as often as the males. I deal in facts, not speculation.)

Crushing to extinction our inner reptile response to stimuli of any kind, whether it is fear, hunger, or erotic desire (I can’t actually think of any other stimuli), is impossible. We are nothing more than ambulatory sacks of glandular secretion. Nature has decreed that life must replicate itself; it has no other innate purpose. One of the strategies for self-replication involves a thing we scientists like to call ‘urges’. That’s when a male gets a boner, for example. Organisms that attempt to suppress these urges quickly go mad and behave like Auntie Mildred’s Pomeranian, humping the vicar’s shoe until beaten senseless with a rolled newspaper. In contrast to this aberrant-suppressive approach to urges, the ‘normal’ response (that is, the response that is most efficient and least interruptive to an organism’s survival-oriented behaviors, such as holding down a day job or eating termites) is to allow such urges to pass. They are, after all, just urges. They do not exist.

I often have an urge to blacken my face with burnt cork and sing Mammy at the intersection of Wilmington and El Segundo in Compton, just to see what will happen. But I do not act on the urge. I allow the urge to come and go, just as I allow the palm trees to sway, the infinity pool to sparkle, and the polo ground to exhale dewy mist in the morning when I step out onto the balcony of the chateau. Things go on within us and without us, unbidden and unremarked-upon. To imagine one can control either one is madness. Could I cut the trees down, to make them still? Drain the pool? Pave the lawns? Yes, I could, overlooking certain zoning restrictions. But why would I? Somewhere there will be a swaying palm tree. It is inevitable that a person seeking such absolute control over the involuntary universe, whether it is inside his head or outside his French doors, will go insane. An urge is just like the swaying of a tree. It is only what it is, and harmless. An urge that is acted upon is no longer an urge. It is an action. Not harmless.

The real trouble comes when a human attempts to utterly quash a pervasive urge, such as the urge to mate, past the built-in tolerances of the organism to deny such behaviors. Your basic conservative male (Ann Coulter, for example) is a boiling cesspool of repressed urges. They see liberal types and imagine we are all fucking and sucking in some vast, sweaty daisy chain, just around the corner so they can’t see it happening. They think we’re all smoking pot and jamming cocaine-floured dildos up each other’s asses and listening to Negro Music. The conservative imagines all this, and immediately has to stuff these imaginings down in a dark inner place, because even imagining them is verboten. They are repressed, they are half-insane with paranoid delusions about what normal, open-minded people are getting up to-and most of all, they’re jealous as hell they weren’t invited to participate, if only so they could self-righteously say ‘no’. Liberals, meanwhile, are not necessarily getting laid any more than conservatives (probably we are, though), but we experience without judgment the passing fancies that occur to us, rather than dwelling upon them, half-nauseated, half-aroused, until they become detailed fantasy scenarios that beg to be put into action, presumably on someone too young to be familiar with the concept of sexual predators.

I have often posited in the past that most serious conservative males are latent homosexuals. They are tormented, according to this thesis, by knob-gobbling hobgoblins that were awakened during some fetishistic hazing ceremony back at the fraternity and have since been locked up in an inner love dungeon where they metamorphosed into demons of dingle-dandling depravity that would make even the most debased patrons of such establishments as The Manhole and the White Swallow (tragically defunct gay bars in Chicago) blench with horror. But this theory does a disservice to homosexuals. I reject the premise. Conservative males are not latent homosexuals, they are common perverts. It’s the tendency towards penny loafers and Georgian Revival that got me confused.

Homosexuality is, contrary to right-wing hate-think, not particularly unusual or unnatural in the natural world. Many species, particularly when there is some kind of population pressure (overgrazing, for example, or living in a Hassidic neighborhood) exhibit a rise in homosexual behavior that remains consistent in individuals throughout their lives. There is a famous example involving herds of bison, the details of which I have forgotten but I think there was a whole band of young bulls that ended up making their own slipcovers. Homosexuals that are open about their sexual identity are healthy and normal. They’re just healthy and normal in a revolting way if you’re not homosexual. The same thing could be said about corporate lawyers or the Swiss. Homosexuals that cannot accept what they are, do generally become right-wing cranks, and sometimes get caught testing the waters in the ole swimming hole, as it were. It can be said that all latent homosexuals are conservative, but all conservatives are not latent homosexuals. The ones in the latter category are dangerous freaks.

See, a conservative is somebody threatened by the quality of being different. As in: different race, gender, income bracket, ethnicity, religion, nationality, sexual inclination, language, philosophy, educational background, lifestyle, wardrobe, age group, taste in music, drugs, or literature, different ideas, spending patterns, abilities, politics, friends, entertainments, and hairstyle. Threatened by all of those things, usually. Conservatives are xenophobic to a degree that normal people cannot imagine. To be homosexual is to be not just different, but way different; this is intolerable, and leads many otherwise useful human beings into conservativism, hence the latency. But the latter category of conservative, the sexual deviant (it seems to me based upon my extremely well-reasoned examination of the above list), is the one that causes all the trouble, and should not be conflated with the homosexual. Queers (males, anyway) are born that way, like southpaws and redheads. On the other hand, sexual deviancy (as psychologists never tire of reminding us) is not inherited, but learned.

It’s always someone older. An adult gets at a child, teaches him or her the Way of the Willy, and slinks off into the night. Or the child is told again and again by an authoritarian parent full of bile and Bible that sex is dirty, that Jesus died a virgin, that sexual thoughts or feelings are the Devil turning the crank on your personal erector set. If Uncle Gerald made you play hide-the-salami every night for ten years, or if you feel erotic urges of any kind, you are not, these tragic youngsters learn, like normal people. You are –wait for it– different. Not only different, but exposed to ridicule, calumny, obloquy, and probably (assuming these conservatives actually believe the Biblical vitriol they’re forever spewing, which I am inclined to doubt) eligible for the Eternal Burning Torments Of Hell. Voila! A conservative perv is born: one that will eventually succumb to nasty deviant behaviors, unable to keep the lid on those early traumatic experiences, like Laocoön wrestling with his snakes and little boys.

If God is watching, why do these crackpots keep on buggering youngsters cross-eyed? Surely their bitter old God frowns on that as much as homosexuality, if not more so, and in many New England states it’s also illegal. If God can tell they’re thinking something off-color while driving past the Catholic school (the one that was on the shortest route to my kid’s school, for example), surely He can tell they’re plundering some press-ganged juvenile bottom in the cloakroom of the local ministry? I cannot say what logic supports this behavior. It is hypocrisy of the basest kind, certainly. It may be that the alpha-conservatives convince themselves it’s the children’s fault, for dressing up in those sexy terrycloth pyjamas with feet. Or maybe they are so drunk with power they imagine what they do isn’t wrong, channeling God’s authority first-hand, teaching the little naughties a valuable lesson.

But I think it comes down to conflating urges and actions, in the end (or ‘actions in the end’, if you prefer). These conservatives have spent their lives denying themselves and others various things: they deny themselves the mustachioed sailor of their dreams, and they deny black people basic civil rights. They deny themselves a furtive glance at an early-period Britney Spears video, and they deny women the right to reproductive freedom. The conservative doesn’t understand that an urge is only an urge, nothing more, and doesn’t understand that people who are different are not a threat to them personally, nor to their house-of-cards moral apparatus. They live in terror of being perceived to be different, of succumbing to their urges, and that terror, amalgamated with those simmering, repressed urges, manifests itself at last in vile, deviant behavior that strikes out at the world, wounding its most defenseless citizens and creating in the process a new generation of secret guilt and shame and fear of being different. I guess. Who knows. Maybe conservatives are just born fucked up in the head.

But a list like the one excerpted above is certainly thought-provoking. It reveals in miniature a pattern of behavior that can be found in people of all stripes and inclinations. There are plenty of liberal sex criminals, too, and deviants in every walk of life. The thing that is so repulsive about social conservatives (other than everything) is that they make it the central point of their lives to decry this stuff, calling down blood and thunder against such abomination, and then they do it. They abhor abortion because it is murder, and then they kill abortion providers on their doorsteps. They rant and rave about the dangers of gay marriage, and then they get caught gnawing on some 9th-grader’s weenie. The conservative male is a creature that wants to destroy everything that is different, everything that threatens to tickle an urge into a full-blown offense. He wants to create a world where there is no temptation, no opportunity that could incite his inner monster to erupt and embarrass him at some schoolgirl’s expense. It is of course insanity. I would almost pity the conservative male, except he’s destroying mankind and the world –the real world– in order to keep his imaginary world in order. He wants nothing more than absolute oppression of us sinners, libertines, and free thinkers, imagining in his feverish, gristly mind that if he oppresses us, he can somehow repress himself.